Dahlia hybrida 'Hypnotica White' and Hosta 'First Frost' 22 October 2025

Because I did not want to spend a 2021 Christmas without Rosemary who had died on December 9 2020, I decided to go to Buenos Aires. The first mistake for me was staying in the same hotel that Rosemary and I always liked. 

 I was sitting in a wing chair in reception watching the elevator door and imagining that it would open and she would walk out. I was reading Poemas de Amor y otros poemas de amor by Swiss born Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni.

Because Storni’s last poem appeared in the newspaper La Nacíon a couple of days before she committed suicide, I have never forgotten a line, its final line. “Should he call tell him I am gone.”

Reading Storni’s love poems made me understand that I was falling in love with my Rosemary all over again even though she was gone.

I have written here how I now practice something that Generation Z calls bed rotting. I am on my bed with clothes on, with my two cats. I stare at the ceiling or snooze or read Jorge Luís Borges. I was not aware that Storni practiced an early version of bed rotting:

XII Poemas de Amor - Alfonsina Storni - My translation into English

He pasado la tarde soñandote

I have spent and afternoon dreaming of you

Levanto los ojos y miro las paredes que me rodean,

como adormilada

I raise my eyes and I look at the walls that surround me,

as if I were sleepy.

Los fijo en cualquier punto y vuelven a transcurrir

las horas sin que me mueva.

I stare at any spot and those hours transpire

without me moving.

Por fuera anda gente, suenan voces… Pero todo eso

me parece distante, apartado de mí, como si ocurriera

fuera del mundo que habito.

Outside people walk, voices sound… But all that

seems distant, away from me, as if it happened

not in the world I inhabit.